Miranda Jordan

Miranda Jordan removes a bottle from her tote bag and lifts it up to the window to let the sun shine through in layers of warm and cool colors. Hard black lines break up the light into geometric shapes, each with a distinct translucency that comes from her detailed painting.

Her signature glass pieces, which include microbead-adorned jewelry, electric lamps and bottles that customers often buy to hold perfume or candle oil, make up the product line of her one-woman craft company, Randam Art. Whether it’s taking photos of each creation for reference or just avoiding patterns, Jordan takes care to ensure that no two are the same.

“I just don’t like (to be) repetitive,” she says. “If I can do something different that’s unique and speaks to one person, that is more interesting to me. What I really love is meeting the people that buy them because they’ll tell me why it speaks to them.”

Jordan has pursued the arts since she was a child. Her mother owned a crafts store in their hometown of Devonport, Tasmania, in Australia. Jordan first began to experiment with glass paint at the store almost 28 years ago.

“She was big on learning about the products you sell,” she says of her mother.

“You should have product knowledge. So I got to play with the new products, just because I had to talk about them—which isn’t a bad thing when you’re an art lover!”

Jordan sold her pieces through Randam Art, a name she coined at age 13, which helped pay for her tuition at Monash University in Australia, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a bachelor’s degree in English in 1997. She moved to the U.S. in 1998 and married her first husband, who lived in Jackson.

After they divorced in 2002, Jordan considered returning to Australia, a plan that halted when she was diagnosed with cancer. Within the first month, all her savings went toward her medical bills. She became so sick that she doubted whether she’d ever go anywhere again, let alone move to another continent. “I actually had that conversation with my oncologist, who came into the room and said, ‘The treatment has not worked. I’m sorry.’ … But my response was, ‘We’ll see about that,’” she says.

By 2009, Jordan returned to a more normal life, and while she still has regular check-ups and can’t do much heavy lifting, Randam Art is in full swing. Her time in the hospital even inspired her to found two massive annual events—Mississippi Craft Show, which is exclusive to artists from our state and will have its fifth installment in August, and Handmade USA, which will have its second event March 5 through 6 at the Mississippi Trade Mart.

When not creating artwork or organizing her craft shows, Jordan spends time with her husband of four years, Keith Armstrong, and devotes time to her other passion—animal-rescue charities.